Famed writer James Joyce has been inspiring other artists for decades. Michael Marten traveled around Dublin Bay, photographing scenes and sequences that echo the words of Joyce's Ulysses. Photography is a likely medium to illustrate wordplay like this reflection by Stephen Dedalus: &quot;A very short space of time through very short times of space.&quot;

These
photographs were taken for ‘Jumping for Joyce’, a group exhibition on the theme
of the Irish writer James Joyce at the Francis Kyle Gallery in London, in the
summer of 2013

The
locations are around Dublin Bay, from Howth in the north to Sandycove in the
south. Sandycove is home to the Martello tower that features in the opening
episode of Joyce's novel, Ulysses,
and the famous Forty Foot pool where Buck Mulligan goes to bathe. People have
been swimming there, in all seasons and weathers, for over 200 years. When I
took these photographs in April 2013, a bitter east wind was blowing and the
sea was very cold. The regular Forty Foot bathers are a hardy lot, however, and
they advanced purposefully into the water without flinch or pause. Some swam
for 10 or 20 minutes, others went in for a quick and bracing dunk — "doing
a teabag," they call it.

A
number of the photographs are single images inspired by a phrase or place in
Ulysses. The view towards Howth from Sandycove brought to mind the memorable
phrase, "The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea." And the image
of wind blowing sand over seashells on Sandymount strand reminds me of a
reflection of Stephen Dedalus: "A very short space of time through very
short times of space."

Dublin
Bay is a fascinating and varied area, with well-to-do suburbs and Georgian
terraces, ferries and container ships coming and going into Dun Laoghaire and
Dublin port, the peninsula of Howth and its wild cliffs and splendid
lighthouse, the industrial neighbourhood of Ringsend at the mouth of the
Liffey. In the strong easterly wind, the waves came galloping in with the
rising tide over the vast strand just as Joyce described them: "The
whitemaned seahorses, champing, brightwindbridled, the steeds of
Mananaan."

Another
group of pictures plays with the idea of "time frames" — a phrase that describes how the stream-of-consciousness passages in Ulysses switch between different moments
in time and from one intensely focused observation to another. Two triptychs
show bathers at Sandycove, while a third is inspired by Dedalus' great
question: "Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand?"

The last group of photographs is a continuation of my Sea Change project and compares low- and high-tide views towards the soaring
chimneys of Poolbeg power station, colloquially known as the Pigeon House. In Ulysses, Dedalus "turned northeast
and crossed the firmer sands towards the Pigeon House." Originally a
military barracks, the Pigeon House became Dublin's first power station,
generating electricity from 1903. It is located at the mouth of the Liffey,
where the Great South Wall extends far out to sea to protect the approach to
the port of Dublin. Today's successor power station was built in the 1960s around
the original. Its chimneys are amongst the tallest structures in Ireland, over
680 feet high, and draw the eye from all round Dublin Bay.

Long before iPhones and Instagram: 60 years of one Dutch girl's "selfies" firing a gun into the camera! Outrageous lifetime photo concept — watch her age in the same pose — a split second after she pulls the trigger of her rifles — from age 16 to 88.

In each of August Sander’s pictures Michael Somoroff has erased the subject, retaining only the background, removing what we have always believed to be the “essential element” — the subject, the portrait.